I was wondering how the avatars would look on display during a match since I assume most avatars that have been made or will be made will be exported as .png but anti-aliased so the pixelated designs aren’t totally crisp.
I’ve looked for options to export an non anti-aliased image, and it seems like that is more practical in Adobe Illustrator as opposed to Adobe Photoshop.
I’m working on a draft of our avatar to propose to the team, and on the left is what it looks like while working in Photoshop with a red/blue background as a preview of how it would be on display, while what is on the right is an exported .png at 40x40 pixels at 72 pixels an inch.
My question is this: Are all the avatars submitted in the required resolution, size, and format going to look anti-aliased and blurry on the arena screen, or are they going to look crisp like the left image?
Am I the ignorant one here and is everyone submitting non anti-aliased avatars, or is this something that gets sorted out after submission? I doubt that the avatars on the arena screen are going to be displayed in their native size, or else they would barely be visible?
Hope someone can clear this up or give me a tip as to exporting a non anti-aliased image.
There is a lot of information about designing pixelated designs, but the key is to design the file in Photoshop with your file size set to 40x40, then you can scale the file once completed, and it will retain the crisp look.
There’s a thread that describes how to make my type of CD avatar that describes this in detail.
Can you direct me to the thread? I did do the 40x40 and 72 pixel resolution in a .png and scaling it up results in a fuzzy image, as shown in the images on my post if you could see them. Are you proposing that I have it made 40 x 40 and then scale it up to a bigger size such as 200 x 200?
How are you scaling it? Are you are trying it right within photoshop? If so, you need to change your upscale algorithm to Nearest Neighbor (preserve hard edges). This should be a drop down within the image size window.
The image needs to be submitted at 40x40. My guess is they will upscale it when uploading it to the FMS. Hopefully using the Nearest Neighbor algorithm to keep it crisp.
The way Photoshop upscales the image is based upon the interpolation mode. The default setting (which is cubic interpolation, IIRC) tries to preserve clarity by fuzzing the pixels when you scale.
To get a clean image, you need to set the scale interpolation to either ‘Nearest-Neighbor’ or ‘None’ when scaling. In GIMP, this is set in the tool window when using the scale tool. I haven’t used Photoshop since CS4, so I’m not entirely sure where the setting is.
